John Murphy, Education Leadership Mentor
We all know that the past few years have been a struggle in many ways and that the wellbeing of many school professionals has been adversely affected.
I won’t go into the reasons behind this – we’re all well aware of the cost of living, accountability and the reverberations of covid.
What’s more important is to understand the extent of these pressures and how we can respond to them.
New research from Edurio has added to our understanding of the challenges faced by teachers, leaders and other school staff. Staff Wellbeing in Academies surveyed more than 11,000 education professionals across England about their wellbeing in the previous academic year (September 2023-March 2024).
Edurio’s report focuses on six wellbeing measures – overall wellbeing, quality of sleep, stress, overwork, getting support with mental and emotional wellbeing, and how excited they felt about their work. Teachers scored the lowest in five of these measures. The silver lining was that they came out top on the excitement measure.
The research underlines to me the importance of helping teachers and other education professionals to have happy and healthy lives. Teachers want to be – and are – society builders, but we do not focus enough on helping them to have happy and healthy lives. If that is properly addressed, they will be in a far better position to help children flourish.
How do we do it? A systematic approach to reducing pressures on teachers including workload must be a bigger priority. Smart approaches such as standardised curriculum planning reduces teacher workload and allows teachers to focus more on pedagogy. This professional freedom within a supportive framework approach is one of the ways we will help to lessen these pressures. When leaders ensure their schools have a consistent, robust and well sequenced curriculum for all students the approach saves teachers thousands of hours of planning, and they benefit from the collective wisdom of all. Equally, the learning and development offer can be efficiently and effectively targeted to ensure great pedagogical delivery in the classroom.
Schools and trusts are not islands; working together and sharing evidence-based approaches will also raise the status of teaching and attract more people into this great profession. If trust leaders share their greatest expertise with professional generosity, all students in the sector will benefit.
Creating a culture of citizenship amongst staff also plays an important role in improving the health and happiness of teachers and other school professionals. This is down to the leadership team as well as teachers. If everybody steps up and plays their part, then everybody's job becomes that bit easier. How staff respond during transitions between classes is a good example. If everybody in their classroom comes out and watches the children down the corridor and plays an active role then that transition will work far more effectively than if just one teacher comes out and is then overwhelmed because everybody else stays in. This ‘all in it together’ approach helps to foster happy school environments.
The most important feature of a school with good wellbeing is that it has leaders who genuinely care for their staff – and role model that care all the time. Talking about it isn’t enough; positive relationships come first and those leaders who promote that culture demonstrate it daily. This caring culture should extend beyond the classroom. If, for example, a teacher needs time off to see their own child's end of term play, they shouldn’t feel wary of making what is a reasonable request. The ‘positive weather’ is set by leaders who actively listen and demonstrate these small acts of kindness and compassion.
Really simple systems, coupled with great communication, also help to promote staff wellbeing. Rather than creating initiative after initiative, these leaders promote a culture, and an understanding, of how great schools operate. Staff in these schools aren’t fearful or overworked because they always know what, why, when and how something is going to happen.
The final influence on staff wellbeing is owned by us all – the profession and policymakers – because it’s about setting the education culture of the future. The education world should no longer be dominated by the individualistic mantra that "our children are very different to the school down the road”. We need to act as a profession, not as islands, and work together to find and share the best evidence-based approaches.
John Murphy is an Education Leadership Mentor and former CEO of the 54-school academy trust Oasis Community Learning. He works with CST’s CEO mentoring programme and presented at the CST CEO Leadership Summit. Download Edurio’s Staff Wellbeing in Academies report.
The CST Blog welcomes perspectives from a diverse range of guest contributors. The opinions expressed in blogs are the views of the author(s), and should not be read as CST guidance or CST’s position.
